It’s the latest installment in what is probably the most colorful diversification ever undertaken by a public utility company: From an 1800s French state decree that established a water utility for Paris and Lyons, to a company that has owned everything from Chivas Regal whisky to a Brazilian mobile network, Jay-Z’s record label, and World of Warcraft.

Buying into Activision was seen as a good deal for the French media conglomerate at the time, as the WSJ reported:

It’s clearly a sweet deal for Vivendi. In return for control of what’s being advertised as a $19 billion market-cap entity, the most it will likely have to put up is $2.4 billion ($1.7 billion to buy 63 million newly-issued Activision shares and, if necessary, a further $700 million to help fund the $4 billion tender. Activision will contribute a bit more than $1 billion from its balance sheet for the tender and borrow the rest, if necessary).

And Activision Blizzard hasn’t exactly skyrocketed in value since then — its market cap is just a little over $19 billion today. The shares rose sharply in the year after the deal, but crashed during the financial crisis and are now roughly back to where they were in late 2009

But as the WSJ’s David Benoit points out today, Vivendi have done pretty well to sell off their stake in the company at a price that would have been tough to get a year ago.:

But even while selling at a discount to today’s market prices, Vivendi got $13.60 a share, 18% higher than Activision was trading last June when Vivendi started looking at an exit. Vivendi is also still holding onto a 12% stake, or 83 million Activision shares that were worth $166 million more Friday than they were worth Thursday.

Another way of looking at the sale, from Quentin Webb at Breakingviews: Vivendi put about $2.6 billion of cash into the original merger, and once all is said and done, will have taken more than $10 billion in returns.